Facebook Gets A Hold Of Facebok.com

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Soon, visitors of Facebok.com will no longer land on a shady site promising cheap Apple products in a Facebook-styled theme (deliberately not linking to it) but be redirected to Facebook instead.

That’s because the company has prevailed in a dispute over the domain name earlier this month.

Facebook had apparently filed a complaint against the current owner of Facebok.com, supposedly a German named Franz Bauer (which is almost certainly not his or her real identity) who resides in a hotel in Munich according to public WHOIS information.

He or she will now see the domain name get transferred over to Zuckerberg and co.

Coincidentally, the domain name Faceboook.com and Facebooj.com also lead to that same shady website, and I’m sure there are many more like that. For those two, at least, Facebook has yet to file formal complaints.

Facebook, in general and especially compared to other Internet giants, isn’t all that active when it comes to protecting users from landing on ill-intended websites based on the misspelling of its website address.

According to UDRPsearch, the company has only filed two formal complaints with the National Arbitration Forum this year, compared to only three last year. Closer to home, I know that Facebook.be isn’t owned or operated by Facebook either, as an example.

All this may not be that big of a deal at first glance, but profiting from type-in traffic based on typos in domain names is an entire industry. The more companies make a certified effort in obtaining ownership over these types of domain names, the less of a chance for survival that particular nasty industry will have.